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But did they play a game on it? You see, it's all these innovative details like apple finding ways to talk but "on a phone or tablet" which makes it novel and patentable.;klrng.. Oh excuse me, I just sneezed. Now if someone could do that as part of playing a game or perhaps on a phone, they could get a patent and rule the world.

As far as I can recall, holodecks were supposed to use planar images for the (distant) background or something like that. Of course, they had other components in addition that we don't have but still...

Not really. A small step towards a holodeck, maybe but not a holodeck. More like a 360 projection. People have built rooms like this for various purposes (usually scientific projects), although not usually using a single device to project the whole room. Aside from technical difficulties with distortion in doing that (which MS claims to be working around), the shadows of anyone standing in the room prevents that from being a really reliable method, although it might work for a game system where the whole-ro

I came to loathe the holodeck stories on the various ST sequels. Some of them were OK, but mostly the holodeck was used as a lame device for generating bogus dramatic tension. And the thing was always malfunctioning and threatening to destroy the ship or station or whatever. The first or second time that happened, you think they'd unplug it, dismantle it, and tell people to find another way to recreate.

I though this too at first, but it's not really so close to a holodeck. The holodeck had holographic proyections (ie: 3D stuff), this talks about 2D proyections on the walls. So this is closer to "big screens on your sides" than a holodeck.

Yes, because since a game cave has been created, there's absolutely nothing else that can be done with it. Well, except make the image respond to the player's position, adjust for distortion and countless other things.

CAVEs, or CAVE Automatic Virtual Environment, come with devices called trackers. One tracker is located on a pair of shutter glasses that the user wears. This one tracks the location of your head, which then adjusts the screens for distortion. The other tracker is located in a device called a Wanda, which is much like a Wii-mote but about 100 times more accurate. The trackers use a magnetic field that fills not just the sides of the CAVE screens it self (10x10x10 foot cube), but beyond that.

Microsoft's innovation appears to be that it does the same thing, but with just one projector, that uses the walls around the room for peripheral vision - a highly useful feature (just ask any hardcore FPS gamer who has changed his FOV setting). It's probably not as accurate or as pretty, and it's likely going to be somewhere below the half a million you need to build a legitimate CAVE.

Doesn't Plato own the patent for projecting images on the walls of CAVEs? Although I think Socrates could claim prior art. Also, their technique didn't require head tracking, the users' heads were strapped in so they couldn't move--they were indeed limited to peripheral vision for seeing anything not in front of them.

Heh, I get the reference but you could have used that to comment about how old and non-innovative this tech is. Microsoft has patented... a worse version of existing technology. While I understand that it could be a good consumer product, I do find it a bit odd. I guess it's better they do it than a patent troll though.

I'm a MS in CS student and I know the basics of how to do everything they claim. I just don't have the time or resources to do it all myself (was actually working on a project doing smaller subset of their features - turning off projection where the user is standing. Will I get sued for that now?). I also never even considered patenting it or anything else I produce:/

But then the big corporations won't get the patents. Small inventions mostly come from individuals or universities. The corporations incorporate them with other existing technology and patent them. We mustn't let the corporations starve!

Whole room projection has been in scifi forever and a whole bunch of researchers have done it before some with moving floors.

Where this MS patent is different and where it becomes patentable is "main display" and "secondary display" and merging the two.It envisions your TV as your main display, with some sort of secondary projector to do the rest of the room and the secondary projection will merge with what is on the TV.

Flight simulators have used multiple merged screens for years. But the MS idea of primar

IANL, but I believe that is incorrect. A patent application (at least in the US) only requires a "description of how to make and use the invention that must provide sufficient detail for a person skilled in the art (i.e., the relevant area of technology) to make and use the invention." That doesn't mean the patent holder needs to have that skill, nor that the patent holder needs to have built it or contracted someone to build it.

Interestingly, Rodenberry's contract w/ Paramount actually specified that if any device described on the show were to actually be invented there would be an allowance to use the trademarked name and no lawsuit.

This is a rather neat idea. It is intended to present the effect of a CAVE system, but without a dedicated room. The new ideas here involve using something like a Kinect to profile the room in terms of both geometry and color, then adjust the projected images to compensate. The room wall display comes from a projector atop the main monitor, a projector with optics set up to display a 360 degree image. (Aim a projector at a shiny sphere, and you get half a sphere of projection. Two such rigs facing each other will cover a whole sphere, except for the area behind the projectors. Or you can use fisheye lenses on projectors.)

All this stuff has to be aligned. When you have a wide-angle Kinect-like device, control all the projectors, and have modern CPU and GPU power, alignment will be a few seconds of flashing patterns as the room model is built. Thereafter, as long as you don't move too far from your initial position in the room, the geometry should be good.

The wall projections will probably be somewhat low-rez for now, but that will improve as projectors improve. Even with a low-rez environment, you'll have much better situational awareness in games. (In other words, you can see when somebody is about to attack you from behind.)
Any game with group melee combat can benefit from this. Impressive.

Personally, I would rather have a headset with a high resolution, high frequency, curved screen that wraps past my peripheral vision; a high definition, directional, noise cancelling headphones; and a high quality mic. You get the immersion but it is more practical. It also would allow you to get rid of the TV all together.

You do NOT PATENT AN IDEA OR CONCEPT, such as "playing a game in a room". You patent HOW YOU DO IT.

Even a cursory look at the link you provided and the actual patent application shows they are not even similar.

The link you provided says they use an "Intersense IS-900 ultrasonic/accelerometer-based tracking system". Claim 1 of the patent says they use a camera. Those are not the same.

The link you provided clearly shows they are using flat, carefully positioned white walls. The patent says that they use the camera "to compensate for the topography of the environmental surface". A different claim states that they "compensate for the color of the environmental surface".

They also talk about things like "shielding the user from the light by detecting his position". In other words, when the user is facing the projector, block out the image that would displayed on his face so as to not blind him. Clearly they don't have to do this in the cave system since it is using rear-projection.

When oh when is the slashdot crowd going to learn what patents are, what they protect, and what prior art is and is not? Something in a movie or science-fiction book is NOT prior art. Something that has the same end result but gets there in a different way is NOT prior art.

You do NOT PATENT AN IDEA OR CONCEPT, such as "playing a game in a room". You patent HOW YOU DO IT.

You haven't seen too many patents if you believe this. Patenting the goal is pretty common.

Something in a movie or science-fiction book is NOT prior art.

Tell it to Charles Hall, denied a patent on the waterbed because of a description in, yes, a science fiction book. Of course, nowadays the patent office is more strict, and nothing counts as prior art except another patent covering the same invention, and

This is a patent APPLICATION, not a PATENT. The USPTO PAIR website, so far, has no examiner-side documents. As this was filed just 18 months ago, and things at the USTO can take around 30 months for a final decision, there will be plenty of time to examine prior art. I'm not convinced CAVE totally preempts this patent, either. CAVE is a room with perfectly flat walls and no furniture. The MS spec and claims describe the ability for the system to perceive depth and obstructions and distort the projectio

Yes, its 3d projection mapping, as in that awesome vid. However, I believe the idea behind the patent is the ability to do the 'mapping' of the surface to be projected on every time the Xbox is turned on, or at least by calibration within a reasonable time. Maybe there is a device that does this now. Anyone? Also, there is language in the spec suggesting that the mapping dynamically changes to detect the user's position (e.g. movement within the room is detected, the system doesn't just assume the player

So -- they're suggesting running a game in a CAVE virtual environment? Not exactly new. Multiscreen flight sims [xplane] are examples of one form of prior art (ok -- not quite CAVEs, but I don't know of a game in a CAVE environment. To argue that doing so is somehow non-obvious would be ridiculous.
But I guess that's what lawyers are paid to do.

I'm not so sure. I can't speak for OP but I don't imagine I'm the only one around here who has softened their stance with Microsoft over the years. I went from hater to neutral and was genuinely impressed by the Kinect. I have high hopes for this one after the Kinect went pretty well. (aside from my room being too small to play without crashing into things...a lot.:P )

If it's a patent issue, btw, I guess I'm not bothered much by large scale, high risk, research heavy patents. I'm more bothered by the stuf

Why am I not surprised with a UID like "KinkyKing" you are posting "more baby more"?

As for TFA, who in the hell is gonna have a room so perfectly uncluttered and whose walls are all bare enough to make this worth using? I think a more workable idea was that one I saw awhile back where they had the VR helmet and a little treadmill like thing that allowed 360 degree movement. At least with that the player could stand in one little spot and not have to worry about having perfectly clear walls to project their games onto.

Frankly though with all the patents that all the big corps are getting nowadays it seems to me more like they are just throwing shit at a wall and hoping that something sticks. Since patents last for 20 years and the USPTO lets you be vague as hell when it comes to them I wouldn't be surprised if anything involving games and projection for the next 20 odd years will be getting a phone call from a MSFT lawyer with their hand out. We really need a "use it or lose it" clause where if you don't actually use the patent to make some product, at a reasonable price and offered at a reasonable number of locations to keep them from just making a one off and asking a million bucks for it, then you lose the patent, simple as that. That would help get rid of all the patent trolling and might even keep companies from spamming the USPTO by making them think about having to actually make a product of some kind out of what they are filing for.

It was for some show where they tried to cook up a "dream rig" of absolute cutting edge and they had a bunch of Hollywood SFX guys helping out. The thing used some sort of belt system that was able to switch direction, don't ask me to explain the thing but I can tell you they did have a small harness to keep him from going too far on the system and taking a header. They had rigged up this lightgun M16 that would work in game and track his fire so he could just blast, along with a set of infrared lasers that

Think about making a 'treadmill' that allows 360 degree movement. You are ether standing inside a ball or on top of one.

There is one system (Russian) that does put you in a giant transparent sphere. (Saw this at Nextfest)

However, there are some other systems for doing this that work pretty well...

One is a treadmill, actually two, set at right angles, one sort of "riding on" the other (don't know the exact mechanism, just saw the video) As you walk, say north, the N-S treadmill runs south. If you turn west, the E-W treadmill starts moving you east. If you move on a diagonal they both run in opposition to your movement to keep

One is a treadmill, actually two, set at right angles, one sort of "riding on" the other (don't know the exact mechanism, just saw the video) As you walk, say north, the N-S treadmill runs south. If you turn west, the E-W treadmill starts moving you east.

... until the top treadmill hits the end of the lower one, and falls off.

I'm sorry I failed to describe it to your satisfaction. You did read my disclaimer?:"One is a treadmill, actually two, set at right angles, one sort of "riding on" the other (don't know the exact mechanism, just saw the video)"